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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • If you know someone in IT, it’s worth asking them what their company does with old computers. At my last place, we sent off old PCs to recyclers, old often only being 3 years or so. Most of them were basic i5s with 16GB of RAM, but they were more than powerful enough for a good docker host. I’ve got small stack of them that I rescued from the recycle pile.

    Not to mention the laptops that went to the recyclers. Of course, many of you might think that is wasteful, but the recyclers were refurbishing them and reselling. We got them off our hands for free, and they got to make a few bucks off them.



  • The hardware requirements are quite steep, but I’ve got local AI running in my house. It’s mostly just there for when I want to screw around with it, but technically I could setup OpenClaw and point it to my AI server to use as its brain.

    I’m not stupid enough to do that on any real computer I use, but it might be cool to do on a VM where I can tightly control what it can see and have access to. Of course, that limits its usefulness, but security has a cost.

    At the same time, I can see the allure of a real digital assistant. I’m old enough to remember when professionals had personal assistants that not only helped them keep track of their work life, but also their personal life. Scheduling their personal life like doctors appointments or house repairs. Dealing with vendors to make sure stuff actually gets done, and making sure they are in the right place at the right time. That would be rad to have.




  • Not the one you were replying to, but I’m answering you from a Framework 13. It’s the best laptop I’ve owned. It’s solid, runs well, is theoretically repairable without having to buy used equipment off ebay, and runs Linux quite well. I’ve put a few distros on it, and they’ve all just worked, even the finger print reader.

    It’s certainly not the best price for performance, but I like the build quality, and it let me bring my own RAM and NVME, which really helped close the price gap.








  • I haven’t gotten too far, but right now I’ve got persistent volumes being pushed by NFS from my NAS. I’m using rocky Linux VMs as my target, but for this use case, Fedora CoreOS should be the same.

    I haven’t yet tried using Ansible to create the VMs, but that would be cool. I know teraform is designed for that sort of thing, but if Ansible can do it, all the better. I’d love to get to a point where my entire stack as Ansible.

    I don’t yet have Ansible restarting the service, but that should be a simple as adding a few new tasks after the daemon-reload task. What I don’t know how to do is tell it to only restart if there is change to any of the config files uploaded. That would be nice to minimize service restarts.




  • I spent some time last week learning both Ansible and Podman Quadlets. They are a powerful duo, especially for self hosting.

    Ansible is a desired state system for Linux. Letting you define a list of servers and what their configuration should be, like “have podman installed” and “have this file at this location with this content”.

    Podman quadlets is a system for defining podman containers as a service. You define the container, volumes, and networks all in essentially Systemd unit files.

    Mixing the two together, I can have my entire podman setup in a format that can be pushed to any server in seconds.

    And of course everything is text files that git well.